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john atcheson
Common Dreams Mourns Passing of Longtime Contributor and Climate Activist John Atcheson
"We can leave a legacy of a world in which hope flourishes and dreams prosper, or we can leave a legacy in which hopes are diminished and most dreams are nightmares," Atcheson once wrote. "Those are now our choices. Our only choices."
Jan 10, 2020
It is with deep sadness and heartache that Common Dreams announces the tragic death earlier this week of longtime contributor and devoted environmental and political activist John Atcheson.
Atcheson's family shared with sorrow that John was killed in a car accident in San Diego, California on Monday evening, not far from his home. He was 71 years old.
"We know that John touched many lives and was beloved by those who knew him. While our grief is indescribable, celebrating his life is a way to share our favorite memories, his favorite songs, and build our sense of gratitude for each moment we shared with him," his wife, Linda Pratt, said in a statement on behalf of the family. "He is a shining star and will remain in our hearts forever."
"John Atcheson has been one of Common Dreams' smartest, most inspiring voices over the past 15 years. A great writer. Politically astute. Unapologetically progressive. His death is a huge loss to Common Dreams and the whole progressive community."
--Craig Brown, Common DreamsA passionate voice on these pages for over a decade and a half, John's untimely death was a shock to staff and we collectively send our deepest condolences to his family and friends as well as the countless readers who were informed, challenged, and inspired by his writing and political critique.
"John Atcheson has been one of Common Dreams' smartest, most inspiring voices over the past 15 years," said Craig Brown, co-founder and executive director. "A great writer. Politically astute. Unapologetically progressive. His death is a huge loss to Common Dreams and the whole progressive community."
Born on Dec. 13, 1948 in New Jersey, Atcheson--who leaves behind two children, two stepchildren, and three grandchildren--was revered by his family as a dedicated father and grandfather.
After growing up mostly in Pompton Plains, New Jersey and later Bethesda, Maryland where attended high school. John served in the U.S. Army and later received his degree in geology. Professionally, John served a long and successful career in environmental protection, first at the Environmental Protection Agency and later at the Department of Energy, where he focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy. He was a lifelong lover of nature who hiked and explored the great wild spaces of North America and elsewhere throughout his life. John authored two published books. The first, a novel, titled, A Being Darkly Wise, and the second a work of non-fiction titled, WTF, America? How the US Went Off the Rails and How to Get It Back On Track.
In a eulogy shared with Common Dreams by high school friend Taki Alexis, Atcheson is described as "a man of warmth, humor and a spirit of generosity that lifted us all." Known as Atchee by his childhood pals, John's personality was known to be infectious. "One cold winter day John and I rode a pair of quiet, competent motorcycles over a rise and onto a snow driven field where a herd of deer were grazing," he wrote. "As we were calm they didn't scatter and we romped along together for a long while... even the deer wanted to pal around with Atchee."
After retiring in 2009 and moving to California to be with Linda, whom he married in 2010, he dedicated more time to both his writing and activism.
"He lived fully, touched the hearts and minds of so many, and embodied thoughtfulness and compassion," the family said in their remembrance of him. "We can only cover tiny fractions of his journey, which ended much too soon."
Atcheson's life will be celebrated with a private memorial service with family and close friends next week. His family members request anyone wishing to honor John's life and spirit make a contribution to any nonprofit aligned with his strong commitment to environmental protection and climate justice. One example, an organization in which he was actively engaged, is the San Diego-based Stay Cool for Grandkids.
What We Do or Don't Do
Reading through the digital archive that includes hundreds of John's columns dating from 2004 to late 2019, readers can witness the breadth of his knowledge and his unwavering commitment to social justice, a more equal society, and the essential need to fight like hell for a better future for the world's people and natural systems.
It was in a 2004 column when John declared with urgency that "we have to act now" on the climate crisis. This was well into the Bush era but prior to Hurricane Katrina. That devastating event opened many people's eyes in the U.S. to the intensifying dangers of a warming planet, but it was no surprise to those who had already been paying attention to, and taking seriously, the scientific warnings. Before there was 350.org or Green New Deals or global climate strikes, there were people like John sounding the alarm as best and as loud as they could.
And John was not afraid to put his body on the line. In 2011, as the growing climate justice movement targeted President Barack Obama for his refusal to deny a construction permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, Atcheson was among 46 others who--on a hot August day in Washington, D.C. and as part of a larger wave that summer--risked arrest outside the White House.
What made him do it? It wasn't optimism, he confessed.
"The truth is, I am not optimistic that our actions will change the direction of this particular fossil fueled juggernaut," he wrote at the time. So then what was his reason? "The plain fact is, in an age filled with cynicism," he explained, "I needed to feel hopeful."
But it was not a branded, unearned hope. It was the feeling of hopefulness that only the witnessing of bravery and solidarity in extraordinary times can inspire. With humanity facing down the threat of pending climate catastrophe, "now is a time that cries out for the power of hope," John wrote. "Never before in the short history of humans, has there been such a time."
He continued:
What we do--or don't do--in the next few years will quite literally influence the kind of planet our progeny live on. Indeed, it will shape the world for hundreds of generations to come.
What an awesome responsibility for a once puny species to possess.
What a challenge to face, without hope.
A few short years. That's all we have to choose the kind of future we bequeath the planet for geologic ages to come.
We can leave a legacy of a world in which hope flourishes and dreams prosper, or we can leave a legacy in which hopes are diminished and most dreams are nightmares.
Those are now our choices. Our only choices. We cannot kick the can down the road--we've run out of road. We've run out of time.
Hyperbole? Radical enviro propaganda? Liberal hysteria?
Hardly.
And he never stopped calling for action and detailing for readers the perils--whether under Bush, Obama, or the current president--of business-as-usual energy policies or center-of-the-road politics.
The Establishment's Failure and the Need for Progressive Rebellion
John was relentless in his effort to expose the failure of a Democratic Party establishment that consistently strays from the promises made to working-class people and the progressive mantle the party claims in word but repeatedly fails in deed.
"When neoliberals and centrists defend 'the system' or warn against upending it, they're more likely expressing concerns about their losing their personal power base than they are about the party winning elections," he wrote last fall.
"The time to follow polls is long gone," John asserted. "If we are to restore our freedoms, we must shape polls, not follow them. Fortunately, leading a progressive rebellion against the oligarchy is not only the moral thing to do; it's smart politics, too."
So while he suffered fools not lightly, he never wavered from a commitment to talk sense to them.
"What we do--or don't do--in the next few years will quite literally influence the kind of planet our progeny live on. Indeed, it will shape the world for hundreds of generations to come. What an awesome responsibility for a once puny species to possess. What a challenge to face, without hope."
--John Atcheson, 2011
For those who missed it, Atcheson in 2017 wrote, "What They Say vs. What They Mean: An Inside-the-Beltway Glossary"--an indispensable resource if you're an upstart (or aging) progressive looking to get a grip on the insanity of mainstream politics.
"Given the absurdity of our political process and the media's malfeasance, our national well of stupidity is deep and wide," Atcheson lamented in 2013 while he railed against one of his favorite targets, the corporate news industry.
"Without a press devoted to honesty and accuracy," he wrote in 2012, "our ship of state runs on yarns, myths, and the modern day equivalent of 'bread and circuses,' and we are at the mercy of the evil, the foolish, and the ignorant."
Frequently forced to denounce the corporate media's obsession with balance--"making it puke out nonsense as if it were news"--Atcheson did so with gusto. "One can achieve balance by putting a ton of bullshit on one side of the scale, and a ton of gold on the other," he explained in a column last November, "but that doesn't make them equivalent."
He understood better than most why Hillary Clinton likely lost in 2016 and how President Donald Trump won, but never lost sight of the "long game" needed to attain true progressive victories.
Ends as Beginnings and What Hope Feels Like
Atcheson made his dedication to future generations clear in his climate activism, and that also brings us back to that day outside the White House in 2012. Before being handcuffed and dragged away for trying to stop a pipeline that he believed would likely be built anyway (but notably has not been)--what did it feel like to a person like John who never gave up on the effort to change minds or influence readers even though he was wide-eyed about the intense realities of this troubled yet beautiful world?
It felt like hope, he wrote.
Not optimism, but hope.
And as Robert Kennedy said, "Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
Hope begets action, but action also begets hope. And who knows. Perhaps the tiny ripples of some 2,000 citizens willing to risk arrest are the beginning of a vast tide; a tsunami of change that will sweep away the foolishness that now dominates our country.
One can always hope.
In this writer's final correspondence with John last month he commented, "Interesting times, eh?" In response, I wrote dryly, "The End Times are always interesting."
Though it's certain he got the joke, he didn't let it slide.
"Every ending is a beginning," he wrote back. "Trite, but true."
He then added, "I do believe in history's dialectic"--and left it at that.
Like so many other writers and activists who toil for justice with no offer of reward and little reason to believe victory will be won, John proved--in a manner uniquely his own and one that we who hold common dreams will never forget--that our objections to injustice we voice and the political battles we wage do matter. They matter profoundly and he knew it.
In one of his most-read and widely shared articles of 2019, he concluded in a way that was not subtle: "What's needed is a people's revolution and a radical insurgency that restores government to the governed," he wrote. "Nothing short of that will prevent future Trumps, or solve our very real problems."
We owe you much and we thank you and we will miss you, John Atcheson.
So we mourn.
And--because "hope begets action, but action also begets hope," and because "every ending is a beginning"--together we fight on.
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Just Because Republicans Are Spewing Nonsense on Impeachment Doesn't Mean the "Big Lie" Won't Work
The real jury in an impeachment trial is the people, no the U.S. Senate. But is enough of the nation truly ready to call out the president and is party for what they truly are?
Dec 18, 2019
Republicans are mounting an effective defense against impeachment that is without foundation, but is likely to prove effective. Essentially, they are all repeating the same lies in unison, over and over again, taking advantage of something called the "illusory truth effect," which causes people to confuse repetition with truth.
A less kind--but perhaps more accurate--characterization of what they're doing would be to invoke Goebbels "big lie," a tactic that relied on audacious lies repeated over and over.
They're ignoring the validity of Trump's actual crimes, instead focusing on process and a series of distractions. There's a reason for that, of course. The evidence of Trump's crimes is overwhelming and incontrovertible.
Let's look at their objections and examine them against the facts.
Big Lie #1: Trump didn't commit an impeachable offense
Their first claim is that no laws were broken, or that there was no offense that meets the high hurdle of impeachment established in the Constitution, and that the evidence is based on heresy. They repeat ad nauseum that treason and bribery were not mentioned in the articles of impeachment, while ignoring the rest of Article II, which states that "high crimes and misdemeanors" are also a basis for impeachment.
But, we know--from his own words and the words of his chief of staff and his Ambassador to the European Union--that Trump attempted to blackmail the new Ukrainian leader by withholding tax payer money appropriated by Congress to help the Ukraine in their war with Russia, in order to get dirt on Joe Biden. In short, he compromised our and our ally's national security for his own personal gain. In the words of Representative Jayapal, "Trump is the smoking gun."
This is so much more than a high crime or misdemeanor--it is an abuse of his position that is unprecedented in U.S. history, and it is precisely the kind of offense the Founders envisioned when they expanded the grounds for impeachment from just bribery and treason.
Trump compounded this by obstructing the pursuit of justice in a number of ways, again, in broad daylight. The Founders created a government based on checks and balances between the three branches of government. Trump has subverted the system by instructing his staff not to honor subpoenas and refusing to provide documents. This is both unprecedented and it amounts to prima facie evidence of his guilt.
Big Lie #2: This is a partisan witch hunt designed to overturn the election
Republicans say Democrats have been trying to get rid of this President since he was elected. As Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) noted, the Democrat Party as a whole voted against impeachment three times before Trump's latest egregious crime. The reality is, Trump left them no choice, this time. His violations threatened the thin and delicate fabric of the rule of law. The US has the oldest written constitution in the world, and it has survived and remained effective because throughout our history there has been a commitment to honor the principles and customs that give force to the mere words written on the thin parchment, however eloquent those words are.
In fact, Democrats didn't pursue clear and obvious violations of the Emoluments Clause, and they declined to pursue an obvious obstruction of justice case established in the Mueller Report. Pelosi knew that impeachment was never going to be a winning political issue, and that's why she held back those in the Party who wanted to aggressively pursue Trump's many and obvious violations of the law.
But the seriousness of Trump's total disregard of the separation of powers, and his serial violations of both law and decency left her no choice. To not impeach would be to sanctify an imperial presidency that would be little different than a monarchy.
As for "ignoring the will of the people" and trying to overturn the 2016 election, it's worth noting that Trump lost the popular vote by about 3 million. If the people's will were followed, Trump would not be in the White House.
Big Lie #3: Democrats are impeaching Trump because they're afraid he'll win in 2020
The nature of Trump's crimes also explains why the Democrats didn't simply "wait until the next election," and let the people decide. We expect our Representatives to safeguard the Constitution, and they take an oath to do so. Not impeaching Trump would be a violation of that oath and of the people's trust, in addition to creating an Imperial Presidency.
Here again, the evidence that this is a flat out lie and an attempt to discredit the need to impeach is overwhelming.
Trump loses to each of the three top Democratic candidates in virtually every poll; Democrats swept the table in 2018 and they've won the majority of elections since. The evidence suggests Trump will lose in 2020, and ironically, impeaching him probably works in his favor, politically.
Big Lie #4: Democrats are ignoring the people's business by focusing on impeachment
The Democratic House has passed 50 consequential bills, including such popular measures as lowering the cost of prescription drugs, protecting people from being dropped by insurance companies for preexisting conditions, insuring fair elections, requiring background checks for gun purchases, climate legislation--the list is extensive and important. These bills were supported by the majority of Americans, and they were opposed by most House Republicans. Now they are languishing in Moscow Mitch McConnell's legislative grave yard, formerly known as the Senate.
If time and the people's will were an issue, Republicans in the House would be voting for the bills they've fought against, and Mitch McConnell wouldn't be sitting on them, he'd be introducing them for a vote.
Why the Big Lie is likely to work
The real jury in impeachment trials are the people. As I said in the beginning, the Republican strategy of telling the big lie will probably work for them. The overwhelming majority of Americans are fed up with government in general and partisan bickering in particular, and they have little faith in government.
Both parties have contributed to this: Democrats by abandoning the New Deal and adopting a centrist, corporate friendly strategy that has benefited the 1 percent, and punished everyone else; and Republicans by adopting a strategy specifically designed to discredit government, and empower oligarchs. (see Lewis Powell's infamous manifesto, or "WTF, America? How the US Went Off the Rails and How to Get It Back on Track").
This means a sizable number of people will tune out the whole process, and another chunk of folks will believe the lies. By positioning themselves as "outsiders" Republicans ride the very wave of dissatisfaction they themselves created, and Democrats--having abandoned the values that made them a majority party and gave them credibility--won't be trusted enough to convince people this is anything other than the usual partisan bickering they come to loathe.
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The Influence of Liars and the Failure of Corporate Media
Why does the "big lie" work? For one thing, there's big money it.
Dec 12, 2019
If Democrats say one thing, and Republicans say another, and it's obvious one of them is intentionally lying, what is the "big story?"
For most of the mainstream media, it's not the lying. Their big story is the conflict. This is, literally, a complete failure of the press's obligations to a free society as envisioned by the Founders.
Clearly, the fact that one of the nation's major political parties is routinely and consistently lying about so many things should be big news.
Take the Horowitz Report produced by the DOJ Inspector General's office. Read it, and it's clear it completely discredits Republican claims that their investigation of the links between Trump's cohorts and Russia was politically motivated. It states that the investigation was not undertaken for political reasons. Yes, they do note some procedural lapses, but to conflate that into what Trump and Barr are saying--that the report finds the FBI guilty of a politically motivated hit job--is a bald-faced and obviously intentional lie.
While a few stories do note--somewhere near paragraph 3 or 4--that the facts support one and not the other party's position, that's typically not the lede. For example, the New York Times story on December 10th on the FBI report carried the following headline: "Trump and Barr Criticize FBI Director Over Report on Russian Inquiry." That's news? But the fact that both men have been lying about the report for two days isn't? Why?
We can get part of the answer by looking at how the mainstream media covered the Afghanistan Papers. When the Washington Post broke the story its headline read, "At War with the Truth." Follow up stories in the media used words like "lie"; "mislead"; and "failed to tell the truth" in their the coverage. In short, the lying was the lede, and rightly so.
So, what's the difference? Well, Afghanistan was a bi-partisan lie. Both parties deceived Americans about our prospects.
But when Trump, Barr, McConnell and Republicans lie about an issue, it can't be the lede because that wouldn't be "balanced."
Look, the fact that one major party routinely lies to the American people about just about anything and everything--from climate change, to attempted blackmail, to deficit-exploding tax cuts, to inviting Russia to influence our elections ... even about the forecast path of a hurricane for god's sake--should be big news. And it should be the top of the TV news, the front-page headline, and the lead story on radio programs.
The fact that Trump and Barr are criticizing the FBI Director for not rebutting his Inspector General, or the fact that they completely mischaracterize what Horowitz said in his report--to the point where their statements are 180 degrees from what the report actually said is not the big news. But the fact that they're blatantly and obviously lying is. And it's important news.
Yes, the Post keeps a tally on Trump's prodigious lying, but it's kept apart from the news stories, which continue to report the he-said, she-said "balanced" stories that leave their chronic lying outside the context of the daily news.
Again, the Post's headline on their Afghanistan story was "at war with the truth," while their headline on Horowitz's IG report was, "FBI was justified in opening Trump campaign probe, but case plagued by 'serious failures,' inspector general finds."
So balanced, but so misleading.
Look, the "serious failures" were procedural. Providing misleading information on a FISA application should certainly be examined, and remedies should be sought. But that in no way equates in importance or scope to the main finding, that the investigation was not politically motivated. Making mere procedural improprieties a co-equal part of the headline completely distorts what the report said, gives fuel to crackpot and delusional stories being hawked by Trump and the Republicans, and is frankly, just bad journalism.
But it's not just the Post and the Times. It's MSNBC, CNN, and NPR--the whole alphabet soup of so-called liberal or centrist news outlets--that continue to enable lies and liars by according their mendacity the same weight and import as truth. In the words of Eric Sevareid, written about Joseph McCarthy's rein of hate:
Our rigid formulae of so-called objectivity ... have given the lie the same prominence and impact that truth is given; they have elevated the influence of fools to that of wise men; the ignorant to the level of the learned; the evil to the level of the good.
Journalism's first allegiance should be to truth and accuracy in reporting, in the service of an informed populace. This is the rationale behind the First Amendment, and while the press has not always and universally realized this aspiration, it has done well enough that the people could ultimately spot a demagogue posing as their savior.
In an age where Fox News or Sinclair can and do regularly amplify the lies of rightwing would-be despots, at a time when social media can cavalierly expose billions to complete and utter nonsense, the legitimate media has a responsibility to tell the truth, to provide context, and to call a liar, a liar. And it's even more important to tell the people when an entire political party is consistently and routinely and publicly lying about issues that go to the core of our Republic's viability.
Indeed, this is exactly why our Founders saw fit to give them protections under the First Amendment. Jefferson famously said he'd prefer a free press without government over a government without a free press.
But the press is no longer free. It is enslaved by capitalists who would rather make money than tell the truth.
That's why the Big Lie works. That's why it is eroding 232 years of freedom, and that's why Trump, Barr, McConnell and their sycophants get to misinform the people. And that's why Trump will be exonerated by the Senate, and why he may even win in 2020.
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